| playwright, novelist, and poet

About

David is a playwright, poet and novelist. He has written many plays for the professional and community theatre, and for BBC Radio. His novels include Shadow Bringer, published by Oxford University Press, and Robin Hood, published by Barefoot Books. His latest novel is The Hunt for the Great Bear, for which at the moment he is seeking an agent and/or publisher. Several plays for young people are also published by Oxford, among them Lady Macbeth, The Terrible Fate of Humpty Dumpty and Salem, and adaptations of Beowulf and Dracula. He has worked closely over the years with Midland Actors Theatre, on pieces such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Mothers, and, most recently, The White Shining Land, an ongoing community theatre project based on stories of refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers. His poetry appears widely in magazines, and he has two pamphlets published by Fair Acre Press, Road Kill and Through The Woods. His one man play, The Life and Times of the Tat Man, is currently on tour, and he has recently finished a new commissioned play for Regional Voice Theatre, The Ballad of Rough Moey and the Darlaston Dog Fight, which he hopes will be touring from April 2016.

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28 thoughts on “About”

Hey David, for some reason facebook is being weird. So I’ll post the questions on here. I was just going to ask where did the idea of Sangomo come from? Why did you include him in the play? And why did he have no lines. And was wondering about your thoughts of the play, i know its your play, but yeah and about our performance and how i played Sangomo?

In Zulu tradition, a Sangoma is the equivalent to a shaman, an important character who has many functions, among them healer, spirit-guide, narrator of tales, keeper of history, and someone who oversees the rituals of death. So, I think you’ll probably be able to see now the importance of that character to the play. The role is quite central, in fact. The reason for keeping him silent is that it serves to separate him from the other characters in the play, as he is both there and not there, so to speak. Although he does speak through his drum, which summons the stories that the characters tell. So, in a sense, his voice is the most eloquent of them all. The drum, too, is the tradition instrument of the shaman. All the best, David

Hello David, How on earth does one get started in translating a dark humorous diarised event into a play? Do you have any tips? who would I solicit to show my initial work to?
P.S. It is great to know you are from my home town

Sorry I haven’t been able to reply to this comment earlier. Your questions are Big Questions, which need more space and time than this brief place allows. I’d also need to know more about your proposed work. Maybe you can email me on davidcalcutt@gmail.com.

Hey David, I love your works! Just a question, seeing as you wrote a monologue on it, how do you pronounce beowulf? I have heard many different interpretations but I would like to know how you do it as you have written a monologue based on it.

[…] David Calcutt is Writer in Residence at Caldmore Community Garden. And author of Crowboy, Shadow Bringer and The Map of Marvels: Oxford University Press, and Robin Hood: Barefoot Books https://davidcalcutt.com/about/ […]

Hi David,
After reading / studying the terrible fate of humpty dumpty, I’d love to know where the inspiration for this book came from? It’s a very deep and complicated story and one which i’ve really enjoyed reading.
Thanks,
Liam

Hello Liam
Thank you very much for writing to let me know that you liked the play. I do appreciate it. The idea for the play began when I was working with a youth theatre, exploring the theme of bullying. I came across an item in a newspaper about the death of a boy and we decided to make that the central drama of our play. I was interested in examining not just how the boy’s death but why, looking at the all the varied factors and events that led up to his death, some of them intentional, some accidental. So then I made the decision to place the boy’s death at the start of the play, and tell the story backwards, a little bit like a detective story. I do think that often the reasons tragic things happen are many and complicated, and I wanted the play to reflect this as well.

I do hope that answers some of your questions. Once again, thank you for letting me know you enjoyed the play. It was good to hear from you.
Very best wishes
David

Hello Megan
That’s a difficult and complex question to give a brief answer to. It sounds like a test or exam question to me, and probably demands a longer response than I can give it here. I’d have to give it some thought, especially as I wrote the play over thirty years ago and I don’t think I’ve looked at it much since then. You probably know it better than I do.

Hello Jessica. Not at the moment, although we are about to put in a grant application to stage a new play of mine next year. If we’re successful we’ll be advertising for auditions for the cast in the autumn, so look out for that. We will be looking for West Midlands actors who can do an authentic Black Country accent. Very best wishes, David.

Hi David
I run a Youth Drama group , every year we enter the Southern Counties Drama Festival held at the Barm a Theatre Oxted it is part of the All England one act play festival.
This year I would like to do The terrible Fate. Of Humpty Dumpty,
If we are OK to do this I would need to change the gender of some of the characters as allthough we have a number of boys some of our girls are better placed to take some Rolex , would this be a problem